


come home in the morning light

by MousselineSerieuse



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: ATLA New Year Gift Exchange, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But only very slightly, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Mai and Zuko were actually just friends the whole time, Slow-ish burn, come for the romance stay for the worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:55:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28581597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MousselineSerieuse/pseuds/MousselineSerieuse
Summary: “Kyoshi is–a special place. A sanctuary. There isn’t anywhere else it.” Suki’s face softens as she says it, as if her mind is somewhere else. “You’ll see.”Ty Lee can’t imagine what she’s talking about. But then, she thinks, a lot of things she could never imagine have been happening lately.(Or: Mai and Ty Lee join the Kyoshi Warriors, confront the ramifications of imperialism, and also fall in love.)
Relationships: Azula & Mai & Ty Lee, Kyoshi Warriors & Mai & Ty Lee, Mai & Ty Lee, Mai & Zuko (Avatar), Mai/Ty Lee (Avatar), Sokka/Zuko (Background), brief Ty Lee/Original Female Character
Comments: 14
Kudos: 53





	come home in the morning light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lesmiserablol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesmiserablol/gifts).



> For [lesmiserablol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesmiserablol/pseuds/lesmiserablol)/[@bisexuallsokka](https://bisexuallsokka.tumblr.com/), who requested friends-to-lovers. Hope you enjoy!
> 
> (This was originally meant to be a one-shot, and it just absolutely spiraled out of control in the time I gave myself to write it, so now it's going to be a two-shot. I apologize for any frustration this causes, but the good news is that Part 2 should be out relatively quickly. Part 2 will feature political intrigue, background Zukka, the ongoing scars of war, and ultimately, _resolution_ )

In the beginning they put her in solitary confinement. There isn’t any questioning, but maybe there doesn’t need to be. Ty Lee practices dynamic stretching and tracks the movement of the sun, and in her dreams she sees Azula’s body falling, limp and helpless, at her feet over and over again.

She dreams about Mai, too, about the way she looked right after they landed in front of her: hard, defiant, as if she were chiseled in stone. As if she were ready to pass into legend, to become a girl in a peasant song who died for–for whatever Mai was ready to die for, because the thing is that Ty Lee still doesn’t _know._

* * *

Every time the guards come to bring her meals, she asks them which islands their families are from. They never say anything, but sometimes there’s a pause before the footsteps start receding down the hall, and when on the third day someone arrives to escort her to the prison yard, she wonders if this had anything to do with it.

The light is dazzling, and the stares are easy to ignore. Mai is leaning against a wall in one corner, looking even paler than usual. Their eyes lock onto each other at the same time.

It isn’t so different really from the Academy courtyard during lunch hour, her and Mai and everyone sitting around and talking, and Ty Lee can picture the lofty way Mai would lift her chin if she told her this. 

“Hey,” she says. Her mind is swarming with questions, so many that she can’t quite put them into words, and her first instinct is to say something flat and obvious, something like _How have you been_ , but she knows that–

Not far from them, five girls sit in what could almost be a formation under the yard’s only tree. One of them rests her chin on another’s shoulder, whispering something. Their eyes swerve collectively in her and Mai’s direction, with a familiarity in their gaze that Ty Lee can’t return.

“Why did you do it?” says Mai. Her voice cracks like she hasn’t used it in a long time. One of the girls under the tree is standing up now, walking toward them.

Ty Lee whips around. “That’s what I was going to ask _you_.”

* * *

Ty Lee remembers Mai and Zuko leaning over the railing of the ship that brought them home, their heads turned toward each other and their voices too quiet to hear. She remembers the half-irritated look she gave him when they were sitting around that bonfire on Ember Island–only weeks ago, and isn’t it strange how a few weeks can feel like your entire life? 

Mostly, she remembers them sparring: her knives and his swords, something Ty Lee doesn’t understand why Zuko would even _need_. Ty Lee remembers them in the palace training grounds and in Mai’s mother’s vacant garden, the clang of metal on metal, their faces flushed with exertion, spinning out with dramatic flourishes and dropping their weapons in the grass.

(“If Mai wants to spend all her time playing knives with Zuzu, I think we should let her. Don’t you?”)

She remembers how, on the day of the war meeting before the invasion, Mai sat by the window and watched the palace across the street as if for signs. Ty Lee made them cups of syrupy-sour hibiscus tea, and when she asked Mai what she was worried about Mai turned to her sharply, eyes flashing, and said: “You _know_ what I’m worried about.”

* * *

“I want you to show me,” this girl–Lian–says. Lian, whose hands Ty Lee once tied behind her back, now looks at her appraisingly. The deputy, not the leader, but clearly the leader in practice. Her fellow warriors flank her on either side, almost as identical in their prison uniforms as they were the last time they met.

“You’ve seen her do it,” says Mai.

Lian doesn’t flinch. “I want to see how it works.”

Ty Lee inhales, summoning her concentration, reaching out to feel the pulse and flow of her own _chi._ It isn’t so different, she thinks. Of course this would be something they wanted.

“ _And_ ,”–Lian interrupts–“I don’t want you touching any of us.”

Ty Lee steps back.

“I don’t trust you. I’m sure you understand why. And I don’t want us down one if this ends up coming to a fight.”

The nearest guard is halfway down the wall. The rest are breaking up a well-timed general melee in the opposite corner of the yard. Ty Lee smiles, and hopes she looks like someone who hasn’t spent this entire conversation internally debating whether she and Mai could hold out against the Kyoshi Warriors. (Two on five isn’t great odds, but if Mai can find something to throw–)

 _“_ I want you to show me on _her_.”

There’s a momentary pause, and then Mai sighs. “ _Fine._ Just hold these for me, will you?”

She reaches into her pocket, and drops five small, sharpened pieces of ceramic until Ty Lee’s outstretched hand. 

“Where did you–” someone asks.

“They brought me a teapot once in solitary,” Mai says. “There. I’m ready.”

Lian’s shoulders tense. Ty Lee breathes in. “So. Your body has all of this energy called chi, right? And chi is what lets you move and fight and bend, if you’re a bender. And normally your chi is always flowing through your body, like–like something that flows–”

“A river,” Mai supplies.

“Like a river, but only sort of, because a river only moves in one direction, and chi is a closed system. Like a _cycle_ of something. But then if someone hits you in the right places it can disrupt the flow of chi, and then you can’t do any of the things you need it for until your body can restart the flow again. And that’s what chi-blocking is.”

She takes a step forward. Mai is standing there, hands hanging by her sides. Even when they were little, you could tell by looking at Mai’s hands when she was actively _trying_ to keep still. Ty Lee balls up her fists and assumes a basic stance, and then–it’s like she _can’t_ –

The last person she chi-blocked was Azula.

She stands there frozen for one beat, then two. She can feel all five pairs of eyes watching them. In her head, somewhere, she hears the _clang_ of the gondola coming unjammed.

“It’s okay.”

She blinks. Mai takes a step closer. “You can hit me, Ty. It’s fine.” Her eyes are golden and, for half a second, unguarded. “You’ve done it to me before, remember?”

And Ty Lee does remember. All those training fights, the sparring sessions at school and on the palace roof and by the side of an Earth Kingdom road. Mai slumping to the ground and complaining about bruises, her own sleeves torn so far to shreds that her mother once threatened to stop sending her new _hanfu._ And then, in this place–it doesn’t seem real, on first thought, doesn’t seem like something that could happen. Ty Lee doesn’t _want_ to think about it.

She delivers two sharp blows to Mai’s solar plexus, and as her body goes limp, she catches her. 

There’s no decision involved. One minute she’s unable to move, and the next she’s holding Mai under her arms, her back flush against her, supporting her weight. Mai can’t look up at her, but Ty Lee can see the movement of her eyelashes as she blinks. She can feel the quick, inadvertently panicked beating of her heart.

“Thanks,” Mai says, dryly.

Ty Lee looks at the five girls surrounding her, and something strange happens: suddenly, there’s nothing identical about them. Some of their eyes are wide with shock, and others narrowed with interest, and one girl–the little round-faced one on the end of the lineup–is even giggling behind her hand. 

“So,” says Lian, resolutely unimpressed. “She can’t move?”

“Completely immobilized,” says Mai. “You should really try it sometime.”

“And you can teach us?”

Ty Lee offers her sweetest smile. “I can try.”

(Later, Lian and two others help Mai walk back to her cell.)

* * *

It begins this way, with information and instruction, and in exchange the Kyoshi Warriors don’t ambush them in their sleep. Ty Lee thinks, more than once, that if they were dealing with Azula this would only be the beginning of a trap. But Lian isn’t Azula. She watches them carefully, and when she’s suspicious of something, she says so.

Besides, the five girls don’t have the kind of ingrained coordination necessary to pull off such an organized deception. Lian, Jinyi, Xue, Kami, and Yawen move together, but they don’t _think_ together. Jinyi laughs at everything, and Yawen asks them questions about the Caldera, and Kami refuses to speak to either Mai or Ty Lee unless it’s absolutely necessary. And somehow they all end up sitting together under the tree.

Ty Lee learns which guards to smile at and which to avoid, who their favorite prisoners are and who everyone else fears. It’s not so different from being in the circus, or at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls, or a million other places. She tries to explain this to Mai once, but Mai rolls over and stares at the wall, and Ty Lee never brings it up again. Every day is the same as the one before it, and this makes it easier not to think about the things she doesn’t want to think about. 

Just when Ty Lee is starting to get really good at it, the war ends. 

* * *

“The girls and I have made a decision.”

Lian is standing in the open door of their cell, and for the first time since Ty Lee has known her, she looks hesitant. Mai, writing letters on the floor, glances up and says, “About?”

(It’s not that Ty Lee didn’t expect the Avatar to win. It’s more that she didn’t expect Azula to _lose_ , even after everything. Not in any of the ways people are saying she did.)

Lian closes the door behind her. “We voted,” she says, “and the decision was three to two. I’m here to offer you membership in the Kyoshi Warriors.”

There’s a silence. Ty Lee exits her handstand and looks at Mai, who looks at her. 

“It would be conditional, of course. Six months of initiation, and then the whole order votes on whether you can fully join.”

Ty Lee bounces from one foot to another. “Why would you–what made you decide to vote on it?”

“I wouldn’t know. It wasn’t my idea. I suppose Xue and Yawen thought you two might not have anywhere else to go.” Lian sighs. “I was against it, personally–”

“Yes,” says Ty Lee.

She can feel Mai looking at her again. She turns in a slow, lazy pirouette. “Xue and Yawen were right. I don’t have anywhere else to go!”

Better than the palace, she thinks, her mind crackling with possibility. Better than the circus, if it’s even still around–everyone would know who she is now. _Impossibly_ better than home.

“Well–congratulations,” says Lian, after a pause. She looks down at Mai. “What about you?”

Ty Lee stops moving. She looks at Mai, surrounded by pieces of paper covered in her neat, precise characters: letters to Zuko, letters to her parents and her uncle. A river of ink, where Ty Lee has nothing. If Zuko really is the Fire Lord now, then maybe Mai wants to stay at the palace with him. For some reason, this idea makes her chest feel tight.

Mai sighs. Then she picks up the letter she was writing, and crumples it up. “Sure,” she says finally. “Why not?”

* * *

They do each other’s makeup for the coronation. Xue, with her quiet voice, offers to teach them how. “We know,” says Mai flatly. 

Xue frowns, then leaves. “I guess you do.”

Their uniforms are handed down to them. The uniforms are very important. Mai’s skirt is too short for her, and she holds her fan languidly, lazily, the way Caldera women do. Ty Lee opens hers, and runs the tip of her finger lightly along the sharpened edge. 

Ty Lee has been to coronations before. She has stood in this exact plaza, significantly further back, and awaited the proclamation of the Fire Lord. And now she’s here in foreign clothing–unmistakable, and unrecognizable. The sun is hot, and the war is over.

“I’m going to find Zuko,” says Mai. “I should–probably tell him I’m leaving.” She isn’t sure whether Mai doesn’t want the other warriors to hear, or whether she doesn’t care. “Do you want to come?”

Ty Lee can’t imagine what she would even _say_ to Zuko, now. She looks at the wings of the palace enfolding the crowd, and wonders where Azula is. She thinks about the look on Azula’s face the last time she saw her: pure, deep-black disgust. 

“No,” she says. “I’m all right.”

She watches Mai disappear into the throng of people, and cheers herself up with the thought that if any of her sisters are here, they won’t be able to recognize her.

* * *

The last time Ty Lee saw Suki, she was trying to throw her off the roof of a gondola. Normally this would make her nervous, but this is actually becoming a common theme with a lot of her new friends.

Now, Suki is watching the shoreline, Harbor City fading into the distance as they move toward the Gates of Azulon. Ty Lee wonders if she’s thinking about that cute Water Tribe boy, or about the months she spent in prison, or about the place Ty Lee has never seen that she’s now promised to call home, or–there are actually a lot of things that Suki could be thinking about.

Ty Lee hasn’t moved, but Suki turns to look at her anyway. “Did you need something?”

Ty Lee smiles. She steps forward, lightly, careful to give Suki enough space. “I just wanted to thank you.”

“For what?”

“For letting us stay.”

Suki looks back out at the waves. “You were voted in. It wasn’t my decision.”

“But you didn’t _stop_ it.”

“Because I can’t.”

The sea is calm, but as she steps closer to the edge Ty Lee’s footing feels somehow uneven. “You’re the leader,” she says, carefully.

Suki turns, and snaps open her fan. Beneath her makeup, her eyes are thoughtful. “What do you think being the leader means?”

Ty Lee bites her lip. This was not how she expected this conversation to go. “It means–that you’re in charge?”

“It means that I was _elected_ to be the leader. Just like you were elected to join.” Suki rests her elbow on the railing. “Look. This might not be what happens where you come from, but on Kyoshi people don’t just get born into power because of who their parents are. The community chooses its rulers, and the Warriors choose their commanders. And commanders only have the powers they’re given. I couldn’t overturn your nomination if I wanted to.”

Ty Lee doesn’t ask Suki whether or not she would want to. Instead, she tries to imagine explaining this system to Azula.

“You’re right,” she says. “That’s not what happens in the Fire Nation.”

Suki turns her face back to the horizon, scrutinizing it. The ships still docked in the harbor look tiny now. Suki _hates_ the Fire Nation, Ty Lee thinks. And she wonders whether this place she pledged herself to–this distant island–is going to hate her too.

“Kyoshi is–a special place. A sanctuary. There isn’t anywhere else it.” Suki’s face softens as she says it, as if her mind is somewhere else. “You’ll see.”

Ty Lee can’t imagine what she’s talking about. She can’t imagine having to _decide_ who’s going to be in charge. But then, she thinks, a lot of things she could never imagine have been happening lately. And so she stands there at the railing and watches the known world disappear into the horizon for the second time in her life.

* * *

They put her and Mai in separate rooms at first. _For security_ , is the implication, even if no one actually says it.

“Just like in prison!” Ty Lee says, not caring if it makes people uncomfortable. Because she _wants_ to make them uncomfortable, just a little bit, and she knows the cheerfulness in her voice will confuse them. Mai, her arms full of linens, looks over her shoulder but says nothing. To her surprise, Suki actually laughs. 

The air here is crisp, even though it’s the middle of summer. It smells like pine and salt and the smoke of the bonfire lit to welcome the Kyoshi Warriors home. To welcome _them_ home officially, her and Mai included, even though Ty Lee knows that can’t possibly have been anyone’s intention.

In the winter, Suki explains, they spread out their bedrolls in the training hall at night. But now, when it’s warm, they sleep out on the porches: half at the front of the house, half in the back. 

That first night, she barely sleeps. The stars are arrayed above her, brighter than she ever remembers them being in the Caldera, in their light she can see Avatar Kyoshi presiding over the village square, with the sea crashing against the beach behind her.

* * *

“Did you know,” Mai tells her the next morning, “that you and I are the only initiates here over the age of ten?”

Mai is standing in front of the back porch’s only mirror, pinning her hair into place. This is surprising to Ty Lee: that there are so few mirrors. _We help each other_ , Xue had explained, painting black lines down the arches of Kami’s brows. 

“I didn’t think about it,” Ty Lee admits.

“Lian’s sister is one of them. She told me.” She picks up her last pin, steps back, studies herself. “I can’t believe we’re going to have to wear this makeup _every day._ ”

“I _like_ the makeup. It’s editorial. And it’s honestly a big improvement on–”

 _Mai finally gets to wear makeup that isn’t totally depressing._ The thought flickers into her mind like a candle being lit. It wasn’t even that long ago that they were in Ba Sing Se.

Mai doesn’t need the rest of the sentence to understand the meaning. She rolls her eyes. “Whatever. We should probably go to breakfast.”

Ty Lee traces a line in the floor with the tip of her sandal. She wonders, sometimes, why Mai said yes to joining at all. She wonders, sometimes, why _she_ did. “Showing up together might make people nervous.”

Mai smiles–a smile from another place, a smile that calls to mind lotus blossoms floating in ornamental ponds and disappearances hastily smoothed over. “Do we care?”

Ty Lee pauses for a moment, pretending to consider, breathing in the thin foreign air. Then she smiles back. “Not really.”

They link arms, and make sure to visibly ignore Kami glaring daggers at them across the breakfast table.

* * *

In the mornings, as the sun makes its way up and over the mountains that separate the island in two, Mai and Ty Lee learn to fight with fans. 

The movements are easy enough to master. _Turning the force_ , Suki calls it, manipulating an opponent’s energy to your advantage. You have to sink into the movement, and Ty Lee has been sinking into the movement for more or less her entire life.

Mai’s style is different, but equally effective: less fluid and more precise. There’s an efficiency in it. A potential for surprise.

“They can certainly kill,” Kami pronounces at the end of the third day, and sweeps out of the room before anyone can say anything. 

In the afternoon, Mai retreats to the archery range with Suki and a few others, and Ty Lee teaches chi-blocking. 

Chi-blocking is an intuitive art. It is also, Ty Lee explains, about manipulating an opponent’s energy to your advantage. Her most promising trainee, surprisingly, is little Ayai, Lian’s younger sister. 

Ty Lee remembers, years ago, her sifu taking her aside as her sisters were leaving and telling her that she had _promise_. This is a sensitive skill, she was told. It can be taught, but it requires a certain innate feel in order to be done well. Sifu’s voice–Ty Lee never learned her real name–had been grave, and Ty Lee hadn’t understood that. It had thrilled her, this idea that she was somehow special.

“Here,” she says, pressing Ayai’s thumb to her pulse. “Can you feel that? Feel the _energy_ . Everyone has it, and everyone’s is a little different. Now do the same thing with Lian. It’s different _,_ right?”

Ayai’s face is serious, with a tiny furrow in her brow as she holds Ty Lee’s wrist in one hand and Lian’s in the other. She has her sister’s capacity for focus, the same intense determination. “I can feel it,” she says solemnly.

(“What about you?” Yawen asks Mai that evening, after she leads the group in target practice for the third day in a row. “Do you have any mysterious secrets?”

Mai picks up her chopsticks. “It’s muscle memory,” she says. “If you throw something often enough, eventually you learn how to throw it.”)

* * *

The village has a headman, who everyone calls _oyaji._ Jinyi assures Mai and Ty Lee that they should call him _oyaji_ too, but the sharp way he looks at them sometimes makes Ty Lee quietly doubt this. There are other villages scattered around the island, and a shrine up in the mountains to match the one here. That’s all. 

And then there are the Warriors themselves. Active members, in every village, and the retired ones who sit on the council. Jinyi’s mother is one of them. Some of them leave because they get injured, Jinyi explains, and others want to raise families outside the dojo, and others retire just to get out of the way. The first time Ty Lee sees them all assembled, the first thing she thinks is that there should be _more_ of them.

“It’s probably nothing like what _you’re_ used to,” Yawen says, coming down the mountain from their weekly trip to deliver food and blankets to the shrine. “Traveling with the Fire Nation princess!”

Something in Ty Lee’s mind lurches when she says this. She doesn’t even know why. “Oh, I’m from an island!” she says, keeping her voice bright. “It’s not _so_ different.” This is not completely true: Ty Lee can’t imagine anything like her father’s mongoose-lizard stables existing on Kyoshi Island.

“I thought the Fire Nation was all islands.”

“It is,” says Mai, with Caldera superiority. “But not all islands are equal. She means the Outer Islands.”

“As if you can say anything,” Ty Lee returns. “Your grandfather was _a rice merchant._ ”

“Is that,”–Yawen stops walking–“bad?”

Ty Lee looks at Mai. Mai, a little farther up the mountain path, looks at her. It’s funny, suddenly, the idea of trying to explain. 

Ty Lee smiles. “I guess it doesn’t matter, really.”

“Yeah,” Mai echoes. “I guess it doesn’t.”

* * *

She finds Mai standing under the wooden statue one night, looking up into the moonlit face of Avatar Kyoshi. There’s a biting edge to the wind now, a hint of the oncoming autumn. The Ba Sing Se papers came in this morning, with a trading ship bound for the South Pole.

The Ba Sing Se papers were full of reprints and retractions, reports distorted or covered up or angled to avoid asking certain questions. Mai was the one to point this out. There was also a commentary on ongoing negotiations with the Fire Nation: long-term demobilization, trade deals, land rights.

Ty Lee never paid attention to things like that in the Caldera. They always felt irrelevant, something happening in the background of her life with no bearing on what actually mattered. Now they feel distant in a different way.

“Can’t sleep?” asks Mai.

Ty Lee actually jumps. “How did you know it was me?”

“I’d know you anywhere,” comes the answer. Mai’s arms are folded against herself, as if for warmth. “I couldn’t sleep either.”

Ty Lee follows Mai’s gaze upward to Kyoshi’s weather-beaten face. In the dark the edges of the carving smooth away, and it almost feels like the island’s founder could be looking down on them through the hard, black-lined eyes. 

“They didn’t teach us very much about her in school,” says Mai.

“Yes they did. They taught us all about how she killed–someone.”

“They taught us about the Avatar,” Mai counters, “not Kyoshi.”

“Well, Kyoshi _was_ the Avatar. The Avatar before the Avatar before the Avatar, right?”

Mai tilts her head downward, away from the statue’s gaze. “Suki said something to me today. About the island–about how it’s supposed to be this place of refuge for people who have nowhere else to go.”

Ty Lee remembers her conversation on the ship. “She said something like that to me, too.”

She never paid very much attention to history class at the Academy. It was so easy to get distracted by something: a macaw-gecko on the windowsill, an unfortunate hairstyle. She didn’t know Kyoshi Island existed until she ran into its warriors. And then–

Well. She _knows_ it, of course, but it’s still jarring to think about: how she fought against and imprisoned the girls she now sleeps next to on the porch. Azula, she knows, would call this weakness, and at one time Ty Lee would have agreed. Maybe not called it that herself, but smiled, definitely, and nodded without a second thought.

“I dream about her sometimes,” says Mai. 

Ty Lee looks back up at the statue. “Avatar Kyoshi?”

“No. _Her._ ”

“Oh." It startles her, how closely their thoughts can align. "About–the last time we saw her?”

“Not the Boiling Rock.” Mai sighs. “Little things, mainly, from when we were kids. Eating lunch on the steps. Some of the time she isn’t even there, but I _know_ she’s there. I’ll be waiting for her outside the training hall because my parents sent me early. Or I’ll be in the courtyard with Zuko, and I’ll be afraid to say anything because I know she’s going to come out in a minute and see that I’m talking to him.”

Ty Lee looks up, past the statue and to the stars overhead. “I never thought of you as being afraid, back then,” she says. “You’d been friends with Azula for so much longer than I had, and you knew everything about the palace. You never asked stupid questions like I did, and you would do things even though you knew Azula wouldn’t like them. I always thought that was brave.”

“I always thought _you_ were brave. The way you could talk to anyone. You were the only person I ever saw go up to Azula when she was mad–do you know that? And you were never afraid of falling.”

“Well,” says Ty Lee. “I _did_ fall, sometimes. Remember when Azula dared me to do three back handsprings down the Academy roof–”

“And you broke your leg in two places. I remember. My mother gave me a lecture about it afterward, for being _adjacent to the situation_.”

“ _Really?_ I didn’t know that!”

“It’s not like I told anyone. It was mortifying.”

The wind picks up suddenly, rustling the branches of the trees. Silence falls between them.

“Do you ever think,” says Ty Lee, “about what it would be like if we’d done things differently?”

She doesn’t have to explain her meaning. Mai glances at the ground and adjusts the shawl she’s wrapped around herself. “We would have been on the wrong side of the war.”

“Or maybe,”–even thinking it makes Ty Lee’s head spin–“the war would have turned out differently.”

Mai goes quiet again. Then, vehemently: “I hope not.”

“Right,” says Ty Lee, relieved. “That’s ridiculous.”

“You know,” says Mai, “I don’t think I’ve ever thanked you. For saving my life.”

“Oh. I mean, I don’t know if she would have–”

“Yes, you do. Otherwise you would never have done what you did.”

Ty Lee wants to protest, but she has no argument against this.

“Look, I was _ready_ to die. I thought it might be my destiny–you know, how some people are born to rule, and some to serve, and some to die for causes greater than themselves. I still think that, sometimes.” She inhales sharply. “But there are advantages to not being dead. I enjoy it. So: thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” says Ty Lee. Then, unable to help it, she yawns.

The statue looms over them. Ty Lee imagines the old Avatar listening to their conversation–and would that mean that the _current_ Avatar could hear what they were saying? “Our lives are kind of weird,” she says.

“Our lives are ridiculous, and we probably don’t deserve them,” says Mai, sounding more tired than she did only moments ago. “In any case, we should go to bed.”

“Yeah, probably. Good night.”

“Good night.”

“Oh, and Mai?”

“Yes?”

Mai turns. Her skin glows pale in the moonlight, and her hair is the same color as the night sky. For a moment, for some unknown reason, Ty Lee’s breath catches.

She blinks. “I’m glad you’re not dead, too.”

* * *

“Look at _you,_ ” says Jinyi the next day, bouncing into the training hall. “Sneaking out already! What did you even talk about all night?”

Ty Lee puts down her makeup brush. The way Jinyi says it makes her feel somehow guilty, and she’s grateful that the white paint hides the color in her face. “Nothing important. Did I wake you up as I was leaving?”

“No.” Jinyi beams. “I _saw_ you. Under the statue, in the light of the moon. How beautiful!” She sighs dreamily. “But seriously, I wanted to tell you: I can show you a place just outside the village, if you guys ever want actual privacy. Yawen and I used to go there all the time last year, back when we were–you know.”

Ty Lee tries to keep all confusion out of her face. “Back when you were what?”

“Oh, that’s right, you weren’t here for any of that. Yawen and I dated for basically all of last year. We’re fine now, but Suki kept getting mad at us for staying up all night and showing up to practice tired.”

It isn’t a big deal, of course. It’s funny, actually–even as she can feel her heart start racing. “Mai and I aren’t dating.”

“Oh?” Jinyi frowns. “Sorry. I just thought–you do like girls, don’t you? Xue said I was making assumptions, but I was so _sure._ ”

Ty Lee feels weirdly on edge. Of course she knew that this kind of thing happened: girls with other girls. It happened at the Academy all the time. But it never happened so _openly._ It was never something you actually talked about.

“I don’t know,” she says finally. “I guess I never really thought about it. I don’t like boys, I think.”

She doesn’t even know where _that_ came from, but Jinyi sagely nods. “Some people don’t like either. Well. I wouldn’t say that I’m an expert, but if you have any questions you can _definitely_ ask me. See you at practice!”

Jinyi floats out of the room. Ty Lee stares at her reflection, and wonders if this is how people usually feel when they’re done talking to _her_.

* * *

“Do you miss home, ever?” Mai asks her once.

They’ve all gone up the mountain to practice sparring in the trees, and now they’re sitting on a ledge and watching the sun go down. They’re not really alone, this time–everyone else is arrayed further down along the edge of the cliff–but Ty Lee is aware of being alone, of the two of them sitting together. She feels actually nervous, and it’s just _Mai_.

It’s all Jinyi’s fault, she thinks resentfully.

She looks out at the sweep of the bay, the waves stretching out into the horizon, golden-tipped where they reach the light. “Not really. I mean, I miss _some_ things. I miss things about the circus, too.” She traces circles in the dirt with the tip of her finger. “Do you miss it?”

Mai crosses her ankles. “Yes. But not the way I thought I would.” She pauses. “I miss the food.”

“The _food_?” Ty Lee has never thought about the food. “What about it?”

“The flavor, mainly. It was the same way in New–in Omashu. Apparently no one in this country can handle even a _little_ spice.”

Ty Lee thinks about what they ate today: cabbage dumplings, roasted fish, the black tea grown on the far side of the mountain. 

“I just feel so _different,_ sometimes. Foreign. I'm always expecting things to happen a certain way, and then they don't.”

“Like there’s a pattern,” says Ty Lee, “and you’re not part of it. Like you’re reading off a different script than the one everyone else has.”

“Exactly.”

The sun is more than halfway past the horizon now. Behind them the sky is already dark. Ty Lee thinks about what Jinyi said to her, the way she looked when she said it, the words still running ceaselessly through her mind.

“I know the feeling,” she says.

* * *

Ty Lee, brushing her hair out at night, thinks about girls. She tries to think about it the way Jinyi talks about it: casually, without restriction, like it’s something that can just _exist._ She brushes her hair, and she thinks about all the times in her life she’s brushed other people’s hair for them.

There was a girl who worked the concession stand at the circus. Nika. She wasn’t anyone in particular–just a girl washed out of some colonial village, with a long-gone firebender father and an Earth Kingdom mother she hated. She would offer, sometimes, to braid Ty Lee’s hair before her performance, to help pin her elaborate headpiece into place. And sometimes, in return and without any practical reason, Ty Lee would do the same for her–the two of them sitting together in front of the little square mirror.

One night, when the other girls are going down to the beach for what Suki predicts will be the last time before the cold sets in, Ty Lee finds Jinyi alone in the hall.

“I think I like girls,” she says. 

Jinyi is mending her uniform. She sets it down. She stands up, and steps carefully forward to stand across from Ty Lee. “Congratulations.” She’s smiling again, like she’s going to laugh, but Ty Lee has known Jinyi long enough by now to know that her laughter is never mean.

“What–do I do now?” 

“Well,” says Jinyi, swaying on her heels. “The next logical step, if you’re interested, would be to kiss one.”

“Oh. But how–”

“You could kiss me.”

Ty Lee freezes. Jinyi takes a step back. “I should be clear. I’m not looking for anything serious right now. _Especially_ not within the organization. I’m taking a break.” Her mouth curves upward. “And, maybe, you want your first kiss to be special. I get _that_. I won’t be offended if you say no. But if you just want to get it out of the way–”

“Yes,” says Ty Lee. “Let’s do it. That’s _exactly_ what I want to do.”

She says it very quickly, before she can decide otherwise. She’s afraid that if she thinks about it too much she’ll back down, and then it will all be lost to her: this strange, glimmering promise of a world that she’s only just begun to think about. She steps forward, and Jinyi steps forward, and Jinyi’s hand comes up to rest on the side of her face.

Ty Lee mirrors the action. Jinyi’s skin is warm and unfamiliar beneath her hand. She can feel her heart pounding with adrenaline, and she feels–not entirely unlike the way she felt leaping down from that cable at the Boiling Rock. 

They lean in at the same time.

The kiss itself is less dramatic than what led up to it. It feels almost obvious, by comparison: just the soft pressure of Jinyi’s lips against her own. Their unmatched breathing. So _this_ is what it feels like, she thinks. This is what–

“Ty, have you seen my– _oh._ ”

Ty Lee springs back, all that gentle warmth turning to ice in her veins. She didn’t hear the door open. _Why didn’t she hear the door open?_

Mai stares at Ty Lee, her eyes wide with shock. Then, as Ty Lee watches, her face transforms. The veil comes down. Her eyes grow distant, emotionless. Her back straightens. She doesn’t look upset. She looks–

The way Mai looks when she wants to convince everyone she isn’t feeling anything at all.

“Sorry,” says Jinyi, addressing them both. “It was my fault. I have the _worst_ luck.”

Mai doesn’t even acknowledge her. “It’s fine,” she says. “Sorry to interrupt.” The door closes.

* * *

At breakfast, the next morning, Mai doesn’t gravitate to her. She doesn’t even look at her. She sits down with her _jook_ between Suki and Lian, and spends most of the meal staring down into her bowl.

In practice, that morning, her movements are as crisp and as perfect as ever. Maybe even more so. No smile, not even an acknowledgment, a mumbled “thanks” when Ty Lee passes her the salt at dinner.

The next morning is more of the same. Mai and Lian, having a gruff, sporadic conversation over their breakfast in a distant corner of the room.

Afterward, when they break, Ty Lee pulls Mai aside. “Why are you being so weird?”

“What do you mean, _I’m_ being weird? I haven’t said anything to you all morning.”

“Yes, and that’s what’s weird.”

They're standing at the bottom of the steps, just beneath the porch. Ty Lee has a hand clamped around Mai's wrist, and she forces herself to let go of it.

“I don’t know what to tell you. All I did was eat breakfast and–”

“Am I really not allowed to kiss someone?”

She must have said it more loudly than she intended to–she can see faces appearing over the porch railing above them–but suddenly, she doesn’t care.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Mai demands.

“It _has to do with_ the fact that ever since you saw me kiss Jinyi the other night you have been acting _super weird.”_

Mai stands up taller, taking advantage of her height. “I don’t know what you’re talking about–”

“Which is _so dumb_ , because it didn’t even _mean_ anything!”

Jinyi is there, in the group watching them, and she looks so genuinely confused that Ty Lee feels a stab of sympathy for her. But everything else feels irrelevant in the face of the white-hot, glaring anger flooding her now. It feels excessive, even as it consumes her. She's furious, and she doesn't even know why.

“Listen,” says Mai, her voice lethal. “You can kiss whoever you want, whenever you want, and it can mean whatever you want it to mean. I don’t care. I just don’t want to be involved in the dramatics.”

“Well then maybe you should think about _knocking_ before–”

Ty Lee’s voice breaks off. There beyond Mai, there’s a figure running toward the hall. Little Ayai. She’s waving something in her hand.

 _Something happened,_ she thinks. Like an instinct: something she can feel in her blood.

Mai turns just in time for Ayai to come up to her and push two scrolls into her hand.

“Messenger hawk,” she says. “From the Fire Lord.” 

The alarm above them, settles down at that. But Ty Lee knows that when Zuko sends letters to Suki or to Mai, he sends them through the regular mail, by ship. Which means, then, that this is different.

One of the scrolls bears the royal symbol, and Mai tears it open and reads it first, frowning.

It’s the second scroll, however, sealed with a much less illustrious crest, that sends Mai running back up the stairs into the hall.

* * *

“I can’t believe he would do this.”

Jinyi and Lian and Xue and Yawen are all standing around in various shades of perplexity. Even Kami looks intrigued, if not worried. Only Suki seems calm.

Mai is kneeling next to the wooden box containing her pre-Kyoshi possessions. There’s barely anything in it: they’d gone straight from prison to the coronation to the island. Old hairpins, knife holsters, a single threadbare robe.

“I gave them _such_ an out,” Mai is saying. “I wasn’t trying to. I acknowledge that. But I _switched sides._ I saved Zuko’s _life_ , and he’s the Fire Lord now, and my father decides to _conspire to overthrow him_?”

She’s saying it to herself, mostly. She pulls an old letter out of the box, scans it, puts it back. Her green uniforms are folded on the ground next to her, waiting to be packed.

"He's going to prison for treason. _My father._ Did he somehow forget he has Tom-Tom to think about? He’s supposed to start school in a few years. He could lose his place at the Academy.”

“You know Zuko would never do that to you,” Ty Lee says softly.

“Oh, and be accused of rampant personal favoritism in the first year of his reign?”

“It’s the Royal Academy, Mai, not the Colonial Board.”

Mai slams the chest closed. “ _T_ _he Colonial Board is being dismantled._ ”

Ty Lee glances around the room. Everyone is looking at them like they’re speaking a different language. Maybe they are.

“Your father,” says Kami suddenly from the far side of the room, “would hardly be the first person in your family to go to prison for treason, would he?”

 _Oh, don’t_ , Ty Lee thinks. But Mai doesn’t so much as look in Kami’s direction. Her posture shifts, minutely: the only acknowledgment that she even heard.

When she speaks, it’s to Suki. “I need to go to my mother.”

Suki nods, as if this were all to be expected. “There’s a cargo ship leaving for Harbor City tomorrow morning. Early. I checked. It won’t be the most comfortable, but–”

“We’ll take it,” says Ty Lee.

Mai turns to face her. “You don’t have to come with me, Ty. Especially not after–”

“Of course I’m coming with you," she says, feeling something almost like that strange, sharp anger from earlier. She steps closer, and suddenly Mai’s hand is in hers. “How could you think I wouldn't come with you? It’s going to be fine. You _know_ Zuko cares about you."

It's the thing that she would have said anyway, regardless. Mai knows this, knows her. "We'll figure it out together," she says, quietly.

Mai says nothing. Her gaze travels down to their joined hands.

(They leave before sunrise the next morning, setting off into a formless sea. It's too dark to see the shore of the island as they're leaving.)


End file.
